Death To Spies 3 Reborn As Alekhine’s Gun Next Week

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Hitman-y stealth-action with a Russian during the Cold War sounds a lark, but Death to Spies 3 didn’t inspire enough to loosen purse strings and ended up failing two crowdfunding campaigns. However, creators Haggard Games did draw the attention of publishers to help get it out. Now named Alekhine’s Gun [official site], the game will finally launch on Friday, March 11th. Yes, the very same day as the episodic new actual Hitman starts.

Alekhine’s Gun will follow a Russian assassin on murdermissions from the end of World War II into the Cold War across eleven open levels. In Hitman style, there’ll be plenty of different routes, disguises, weapons, ‘accidental’ deaths, and so on. Freedom to murder people in strange and interesting ways.

Here’s producer Andrew Nguyen trying to speedrun the first mission, which is of course a lot easier and quicker with the benefit of knowing your options and where everything and everyone are – quite different to playing it for the first time oneself.

It looks cheap and cheerful and a little 2006, but we’re hardly awash in stealth games, are we? And while launching on the same day as Hitman is pretty dang bold, I can see some sense in it. Hitman may get folks pumped for stealthmurder, but what when you’re done with the first slice? Alekhine’s Gun, maybe. It’ll cost £29.99 when it arrives on Steam on March 11th.

Came here to say exactly the same thing; a quicksave feature (or maybe a rewind mechanic like Prince of Persia and Shadwen) is quite essential for a stealth game.

Also, I can’t understand why the Hitman series has so many weapons, if it’s a stealth game; I remember the first 3 Splinter Cell games barely had a pistol and some rubber bullets to knock out enemies, and it was awesome. And yes, I hate Dishonored for the same reason too, for offering me an extremely cool arsenal, but at the same time slapping me on my face for using them.

SC3 did add the rifle modules, which was a totally superfluous feature. The sniper mode became armor-piercing and unsilenced, while they added a shotgun and gave you penalties in accuracy and recoil for leaving the launcher equipped. So of the four modules, two were totally pointless in a stealth game, the third was what we had before, and the fourth was just a buff.

Chaos Theory may have been one of the best games in the series, but it also showed early hints of Ubisoft’s developing tendency to add pointless choices.

Bugger, for a sec I thought we had a new open-worldish game set in an Old West Victorian-era style universe a la RDR. Not to be. Not to be. I mean, WW2 again? Seriously? On another note, I was expecting your secret-reveal-o caption to be something along the lines of Brokeback Mountain… Snapneck Gargoyle-Urinal? That’s Shmersh for ya, eh komradski!

Maybe I’m not enough of a hipster or casual gamer, but I’ll always favour gameplay and mechanics over pretty graphics, so I don’t mind the somewhat dated graphics.

Its bizarre though that media and mainstream gamers didn’t find the dated graphics in Undertale, Devil Daggers and Stardew Vally to be visually offensive despite not looking like triple-a games.

Could it be that in these rare cases media and mainstream gamers suddenly care more for the gameplay and mechanics rather than the graphical quality ? Surely that’s a phenomenon.

The Death to Spies games were more old-school in many ways, but to me that was always quite appealing. The target audience for Alekhine’s Gun is most likely old-schoolers like myself, who don’t judge everything according to graphics.

There’s a difference in that some games just look old whilst others are deliberately stylised. Going for a realistic look is why this one doesn’t look as pretty as its peers, but I wholeheartedly agree that gameplay is the most important so hopefully we’ll get a WIT for this one.